If you want to get up to speed on stuff that affects you as a developer, I Programmer Weekly is a digest of book reviews, articles and news written by programmers, for programmers. This one covers April 18-24, 2013.

News

The first batch of the eagerly awaited Firefox OS developer phones went on sale yesterday and were quickly sold out. If you want to catch the second batch act quickly because Geeksphone has already restocked.

Kenneth Appel (1932-2013) together with Wolfgang Haken, proved the four color theorem and broke new ground in using a computer to complete the proof. For the first time a computer played a major role in proving a major mathematical theorem.

Two economists whose work has been used to argue against government spending to revive the US economy have acknowledged some fundamental spreadsheet blunders. This has led to other Excel errors being exposed and blame for the mistakes being heaped on spreadsheet use rather than the users.

Microsoft Research is holding its Machine Learning Summit at Microsoft's "Le Campus" in Paris. But if you are not attending in person. Keynotes and the interviews from the event will be streamed live, complete with online Q&A sessions.

Physics Playground lets you interactively build simple shapes and torture them mercilessly - all in the interests of physics of course. The best bit it that the code is all in JavaScript and ready for you to look at and edit.

Professional accountant Cary Walkin has used Microsoft Excel to create a full length turn-based role-playing strategy game. Arena.xlsm features over 2,000 enemies, 1,000 weapon variants, 31 spells and four different endings depending on how players tackle the adventure.

What is Intel up to? It has just released a set of really good HLML5 tools, potentially the best yet, that allows you to create apps that are platform independent. This raises more questions that it answers. Why is an "Intel Inside" sticker on HTML5 so important?

Microsoft has won one of the ten Patents for Humanity awards bestowed for the first time by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for providing machine learning tools that allow health researchers to better analyze large data sets.

It might even be that Google Research has found a way to stop you from looking silly in group photos. We all know that taking a group photo is hard. Just try to keep everyone's attention while you compose the shot! And you can be sure that in any group photo at least one person has their eyes shut at the moment you hit the button.

Professional Programmer

In this interview, which completes a trilogy on implementations of Perl 6, we talk to FlÃ¡vio Glock about Perlito, the compiler collection that implements a subset of Perl 5 and Perl 6. It is a very interesting discussion that revolves around topics like parsing, bootstraping, VM's, optimizations and much more.

The Core

Python arrays are powerful, but they can confuse programmers familiar with other languages. In this follow-on to our first look at Python arrays we examine some of the problems of working with lists as arrays and discover the power of the NumPy array.

Babbage's Bag

Part II of our look at data takes us into more sophisticated structures that are fundamental to computing - stacks, queues, deques and trees. If you don't know about these four then you are going to find programming tough and you will have to reinvent the wheel to solve otherwise simple problems.